The news in review

1. People Family

Hello, friends, it has been a while. I hope you are all well and I wish you the best for the coming year. What’s new here, you ask? Let’s see. My mother seems to be stable, thankfully. Her DNA report came back and I am bombarded by potential cousins. Speaking of cousins, I was able to get in touch with one of my favorite cousins who now lives in California. We were on the phone for over three hours; it was enlightening, and amazing to get a first hand view of an Aunt via her son, now in his seventies.

What I did learn by reconnecting with close cousins is that we never knew what was really going on in one another’s households, we merely viewed theater, a show, that the actors played well: we saw what we wanted to see. In turn, they saw what they wanted to see.

Many of us are on the campaign trail to find long lost relatives, to have connections and to find some meaning in relationships we never knew we had. Once you join and upload your raw DNA to some of these organizations, in the fantasy that you could repeat one of those Finding Your Roots Programs, you end up feeling like a fish in a bowl, bumping into the glass, trying to network at a waterlogged convention and getting nowhere. But, it is fun and is good for a rush, and there are so many leads and possibilities–until the person whose name you are searching for is embedded somewhere within 1400 or more pages of data.

So, I get emails, I send emails, we trade info and history, strangers looking for connections via our centimorgans, tapping at generations and exchanging names like baseball cards. Most of us get nowhere, still I leave with another name and possibility and humble myself in the thought that all of these names are somehow connected to me possibly via a grandparent’s cousin or aunt or someone. Somehow.

Caramel came to us with her kittens in 2004. We took them all in in January 2005.
She is the only one left.

2. Kitty Family

We all know that our pets are our family; they become more than the little animals—or big animals they are. They are a source of joy and comfort and when they get sick they are a source of pain and discomfort. As the New Year unfolded there were subtle signs that something was not the same with our last surviving cat, the mother of the two boys who passed, painfully over recent years. Caramel, in the Fall of 2004 would bring her kittens to the back door to be fed: we took them all in in January 2005

This sweet little girl was always a good mother, would feed the children first, would discipline them with a tap on their foreheads if they were impolite. She was the best mother ever and her kids knew it. But it wasn’t until they both passed, of cancer, that she would seek us out on the couch, sit on our laps, purr her heart out. Where the children had terrible illnesses and required major medication, she ended up with a thyroid condition which persists. In September when checked, it appeared that the med wasn’t working and the dose had to be increased. She was always drinking copious amounts of water, and what goes in, as you know, must come out—often flooding the trays under the litter boxes. Within the last month or two she began to eat far less and it was attributed to the increased medication which was normalizing and slowing her metabolism to protect her heart and other overworked organs.

And, more recently she began to display signs of a cold: labored breathing, gurgling in the throat, strange purring, occasional vomiting.

We took her to our vet who did blood work and saw nothing wrong. He was baffled, we were baffled, her weight had actually increased a bit since the last visit. We went home blindsided by what wasn’t detected.

New Year’s Eve was not good; she was miserable, vomiting and vomiting, she appeared to have a terrible flu and was clearly in distress. The next day was January 1st. NOTHING was open except the emergency animal hospital and that’s where we went.  We were there, though it was not crowded, for about seven hours. We ended up leaving the cat there so she could get fluids and be seen by the internist the following day. There was no choice. They had the equipment to do scans and tests. She was brought in on a Tuesday and was there for three days, each day adding thousands to the bill. She was released after hours of waiting, that Friday, slightly better with no diagnosis. The test results weren’t reported to me until five days later when the hospital internist vet returned to the hospital and called me in the evening.  Caramel still wasn’t eating, but she wasn’t retching and vomiting tons of stringy phlegm (pardon the graphics), so wasn’t that some kind of improvement? Something was still very wrong and she was fading. And what we learned from the hospital vet’s C-T scan was that she had a huge water-filled cyst near her thyroid that must have been pressing on her trachea.

Yesterday we went back to our vet who felt the cyst, in alarm. Where we thought we should just begin some steroids he changed the plan and said he would do an aspiration, as the hospital wanted to do (likely for thousands of dollars more).

We left her at the vet. She was sick and weak and clearly was deteriorating. Our vet reported that he removed 15 cc’s of fluid, not even half, from the 6 cc cyst ( over 2″) and would try again to remove more. The hope was she would be able to breathe and eat. (Unfortunately this maybe a short term fix as cysts tend to refill, but this was a killer and at least now there is a way to address it. And it isn’t cancer. It isn’t cancer. It isn’t cancer.)

Only one vet is on duty today. Caramel will stay again over night; they are trying to get her to eat. The vets will try to aspirate more fluid when they are both on duty tomorrow.

So please do me a favor, and send your light to my Caramel. We will both love you for it.

If you are a kitty-lover, search for more stories on the top of the page under CAT.